Arousing and Sustaining Curiosity : Lessons from the ARCS Model

While the ARCS (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction) model has provided educators with a heuristic approach to generally increasing the motivational appeal of instruction, it may also provide a model for stimulating and sustaining curiosity in particular. Such a model is of great use to educators who are concerned with encouraging curiosity as a prime intrinsic motivator for learning and to designers of computer-based systems who wish to incorporate specific strategies for arousing and sustaining the curiosity of users. This conceptual paper explores the construct of curiosity and examines its relationship to all of the ARCS components. A review of research on curiosity includes curiosity as a state of arousal leading to exploratory behavior; levels of arousal; specific, diversive, trait and state nature of curiosity; curiosity as it relates to elementary school children; the importance of information seeking, processing, and evaluating behaviors; sensory and cognitive curiosity; feedback; and correlation between curiosity and intelligence quotient. The relationship of curiosity to each of the ARCS components is examined. Discussion includes strategies for gaining and sustaining attention, external motivation, tying instruction to the learner's experiences, informative feedback and anxiety reduction, and the ARCS components in relation to the Zone of Curiosity